Not Sure If I'm Doing This Right

I leveled my BLU to 10 really fast, so now I'm going back to pick up the initial spells. I've gone through a ton of bees that have used Pollen, but I haven't learned it yet. Is it really this difficult to learn spells?

The bees checked as "Too Weak", so I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

It's all chance, I personally got pollen on the 3ed bee that used it. Most of the time it only takes a few trys, dia spam for the last 25% and event 1dmg weapons are your friend for makeing mobs do tp moves

The level at which you can learn a spell is tied to your blue magic skill. Although you should not be having issues with that at level 10. But if you level blu faster than you level its magic skill you will have difficulty farming spells later.

Just keep trying. Keep your BLU magic skill capped. And most importantly if you plan on taking BLU to 90+: Get used to it.

If you have access to Abyssea - Empyreal Paradox you can go and skill up any magic skill in peace. Unless you don't have any refresh atmas then forget about this area. Also, there is no time limit in there.

Does it matter if I disengage at any point during the fight? Say, to let the mob build TP? Or to get another mob to start building TP?

As with most magic skillups, you'll receive more skillups by doing offensive magic rather than enhancing type magic. If you've got some script to set up to spam cocoon, refueling, etc while you afk I guess this would be an ok option, but if you're going to be at the computer the entire time it would just be faster to go out and spam headbutt on decent challenge mobs.

You don't have to even be engaged at all. One of your friends could be killing the mobs for you and you can still learn the spell.

When i go there to skill up magic. I'm usually watching t.v and just hitting up my macro same thing when i go fishing.

When I leveled blue, I tried to only shoot for the spells that were +5 levels higher than my current level. it's true that having blue magic skill capped helps, with a butt load of luck to boot. Metallic Shell was one such spell that took me a while to learn. Pinecomb bomb was another one, had to fight with ppl for the 4 pops in jugner forest who were farming it for the mistletoe.